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You can read along with the Clover book club

By on 13 June, 2013 in Purpose, Team, Training

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Clover managers are in a little book club together. Want to read along with us? Get yourself a copy of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

Have you read this? It’s about the processed food industry and links to the obesity epidemic. I think it’s going to raise some interesting questions among our leaders. What does “processed” food really mean? Why does it taste so good? Can we glimpse a future where fast-food is A.) not processed, B.) accessible price-wise to everyone, C.) delicious?

Some of us are reading on a fleet of Kindles, others have the hard copy. If you want to join, start reading. Leave your comments here.

 

 

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Breaking open the bubbly

By on 3 June, 2013 in Team

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I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to communicate progress and success to our managers. We’re all able to step back and take pride in what we’re building. But I think it would be great to share more specific information in an ongoing way.

We’ve been growing and the leadership team has grown significantly. I saw a really cool approach at a company in Wisconsin where they made public all of their key operational statistics and financials. The employees would be responsible for updating one of the numbers (e.g., you may be in charge of sales/ sq ft.). It was a cool way to engage everybody. But I’m not sure this would be appropriate to our operations.

A month ago I posted each location’s records on a wall in our shared office. We decided we’d start celebrating every time a location breaks a record. This past week we had 2 records to celebrate: largest days ever at LMA and PRK. That’s Enzo demonstrating how they would pour champagne in his fine dining past. And John in the background pouring champagne the way the rest of us know. This could become fun as we’re breaking lots of records lately.

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Rolando transitions

By on 28 May, 2013 in Menu, Team

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I expect most of you know Rolando, our Executive Chef. Rolando was my first hire at Clover back in 2008. And that experience set the tone for the adventure ahead. A couple months before I hired Rolando I was certain I was going to outsource the menu development to a well known chef. Fast forward a few months and I’d abandoned that path in favor of hiring somebody who could breath life into our menu day-in and day-out.

Rolando and I met almost by accident. I called him asking if he had any former students who may be interested in what I was taking on (he was a professor at Johnson and Wales University at the time). He said “I’d be interested,” and we had coffee the next day and hit it off immediately.

Rolando has been commuting to Boston from Providence for the better part of the past 4 years. He asked me the other day whether we could arrange something that would have him working here part time for a bit so that he can be closer to his family the rest of the week. I think we’ll all be less for not getting to work with him daily, but it just means we’ll have to get a lot out of the days he is here. He’s going to be working a second job in Providence to make this work. We’re hoping it’s a short term arrangement.

 

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Ryan

By on 21 May, 2013 in CSA, Team

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This was Ryan on her first day, back in February when Farmshare signups launched. As a ski-racer, she was well-prepared for work on the trucks. Ryan approached us after attending the JDesign conference at Harvard that Clover participated in. She told us she was studying environmental policy and said she wanted to help build our CSA program. We told her we’d create an internship.

Since then she’s made herself indispensable. CSA signups went through the roof (current count of 500, that’s more than 3x what we did last year). And Ryan’s been the one on the front-lines, updating spreadsheets, communicating with farmers, and keeping me on track.

Ryan’s going to be taking a 2-year job in DC when she graduates from Harvard. I told her when she comes back she has a job running Year 4 of the Farmshare program when it spins off into a nonprofit!

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Fresh kimchi

By on 17 May, 2013 in Menu, Team

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What do you think of kimchi?

Michael Sutton, veteran of OYa, is running Clover Burlington. He had an idea to do something with kimchi. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for a while, but we never wanted to do it because we were worried about the smell. But Mike said it doesn’t have to be fermented. He made up a batch of fresh kimchi for us to taste. It was really yummy. Maybe a component for a seasonal sandwich?

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Putting the team back together

By on 16 May, 2013 in Team

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Vertex asked if we wanted to join our friends Roxy’s and Momogoose to cater lunch for all their 1200+ employees. We needed to serve 400+ people in under 1.5 hours. Even for us, this required an insane level of throughput (that’s about 6 chickpea fritters/minute).

Ayr said, there’s no way we’ll be able to do this unless we have the fastest crew ever. So Ayr assigned all of corporate and management to work stations on the truck. Vincenzo (manager of trucks) worked fryer. Chris (manager of restaurants) ran oven. Sara (MIT truck manager) worked BBQ station. John (finance) and Joey (chef’s assistant) worked drinks. And I worked chickpea station with Rolando (chef) and Pedro (best soup-maker at Clover). Megan (HR) managed the line (which got to be 80 deep at the height of lunch).

I hadn’t gotten to work side by side with everyone since…maybe never! I think I read something about how In-n-Out does this for all their new location openings. And we had a ton of fun giving each other a hard time, working really really fast, and hopefully banging out some amazing food. If you were in that line, tell us what you thought of everything. If you manage an office and think it might be fun to have Clover serve lunch, reach out.

Continue Reading →

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In the gray

By on 11 May, 2013 in Team

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Daniel is a new employee on the DWY truck. Enzo asked Daniel if he was in the green the other day. He said, “No, man, I’m in the GRAY!” Enzo looked at him with shock and delight. “No one has ever said that before!”

Let me explain. Early on we realized we didn’t want to use someone else’s POS (point of sale) system. Too much about Clover is too different than any other type of restaurant. So we designed our POS system ourselves to maximize speed and efficiency. Ayr built the first version with help from an MIT grad.

Our POS does a couple of really different things:
-Items get sent to whatever station they are prepped on. So drinks go to drinks-station, sandwiches to specific sandwich stations, etc.
-Food is made in the order it was received. But not totally. For example, your friend who ordered a BBQ after you might get it before you if the BBQ station is really fast that day.
-Items turn from GREEN–>ORANGE–> RED based on how long customers are waiting. When all the items are cleared and all customers have been served, the color goes back to GRAY.

So to be “in the GRAY” is the ultimate challenge…

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CAPTURED!

By on 19 April, 2013 in Customers, Operations, Team

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We’re back. As of Saturday 4-20-13 Clover will be back in business. We’re open this weekend at:

Clover HSQ (Harvard Square), 7am – midnight
Clover HUB (East Cambridge, right near the action), 7am – 10pm
Clover MIT (Kendall Square), 11am-3pm

All trucks will be up Monday. See our locations page for more details. This photo is courtesy of Floyd, one of our employees at the HUB. We’re a block away from Norfolk St. And like all of us, he was pretty surprised and shocked when the nation’s eyes turned on our little part of Inman Square.

 

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Clover truck catering

By on 17 April, 2013 in Team

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That’s us at the Cambridge School of Adult Education Spring party. Sara won the MVP award by reversing down two blocks of Brattle Street in Harvard Square on Saturday at twilight. A woman was so impressed that she came up to the truck begging Sara to give driving lessons to her teenage son! Sara, could be a new career for you if this whole Clover thing doesn’t work out…

Last 2 weeks we’ve pulled trucks up and served dinner and snacks to:

Cambridge School of Adult Education spring party
Founder’s Journey (class on entrepreneurship at MIT, Ayr spoke)
Harvard Leadership Conference

Next few weeks, the trucks are booked for a bunch of end-of-year parties. If you want to bring a Clover truck to your event, reach out to us on the Catering tab of this site (www.cloverfoodlab.com/catering).

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All Company Meeting and Enzo’s sexy truck

By on 16 April, 2013 in Team

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We had our All-Company Meeting on Sunday night. It was really great to get everyone together. Folks from different parts of the company got to meet and become friends. People brought their significant others. Friends and family joined.

We were talking aesthetics at this meeting. We did a scavenger hunt as a get-to-know-you activity. Teams used Twitter to tag aspects of aesthetics at Clover. You can search for what everyone said by searching for #cloverlooking. Enzo concluded with a tour of what a perfect Clover truck should look like. I think it was the first time we heard the word “sexy” at an All-Company Meeting.

Part of the design of our truck is that the truck sort of fades away, revealing the food and people inside. Sort of like a clam, hard and austere on the outside, warm on the inside. Do you think we’ve been successful with this? We’ve started playing with color, but very carefully. In this case I used a Montana paint pen to create Clover’s spring color.

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